Professor Appleman taught high school English for nine years before receiving her doctorate from the University of Minnesota. She was also a visiting professor at Syracuse University and at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Reading for Themselves: How to Transform Adolescents into Lifelong Readers Through Out-of-Class Book Clubs, Teaching Literature to Adolescents,Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents, Braided Lives: An Anthology of Multicultural American Writing, and most recently, Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of Reading.